Making it Worth

Not long ago, I watched a video that made me look at my ancestors with a different perspective. In it, the Brazilian actor Nelson Freitas questioned if we had ever stopped to think about the thousands of people who needed to have their fates crossed, had to fall in love and/or get together either by love or necessity, so that one day we could be conceived.

The counting went on, more or less, like this; to get to my birth we needed two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen 2nd great-grandparents, thirty-two 3rd great-grandparents, sixty-four 4th great-grandparents, one hundred and twenty-eight 5th great-grandparents, two hundred and fifty-six 6th great-grandparents, five hundred and twelve 7th great-grandparents. From this point on, we would already count more than a thousand people involved and hundreds of couples formed, either for love or convenience of family unions (quite common in a not-so-distant past).

Only in this quick counting exercise we reached nine generations in order to get to me. Possibly over two hundred years of ancestry. Who were all these people? Where did they come from?

As many of you already know, I explored a little of the history of my Italian ancestry in my book "The Most Beautiful Crossing" (yet to be translated to English), but this is only a small part of my heredity, since the analysis of my DNA pointed to "only" 50% of Italian heritage (or almost). The other 50 is divided among French, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque (who would believe?) and even Irish. The diversity (although totally Eurocentric) is immense, and I can only begin to imagine the incredible works of fate necessary to make the union of people from distant lands and strange languages, a possibility.

Imagine the personal dramas, the difficulties, the adventures, and the tears shed by the birth of babies that would one day generate other babies, until it would reach me. 

And the main message of the video was quite deep. This incredible mass of people went through a lot to make my existence possible, therefore I must do what I can to make it worth. Live life intensely, in a passionate way, without dramas and useless complaints.  What an inspiring concept. We must deserve those who preceded us and made our existence possible. Fantastic!

But to this concept I would like to add a different perspective.  Brazilians of my age, a little younger or a little older, would remember the singer-songwriter Beto Guedes, who wrote wonderful songs, highly idealistic and inspiring.  For me, his best song is called "The Salt of the Earth", where Beto invites us to "create paradise now, to deserve those who are yet to come".  I’ve been listening to this song for almost forty years now, and to this day it still strikes a chord. It places in each of us the responsibility to build a world and a society that will not only be for us, but mainly for those who will follow, those who are yet to come, to our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc, etc. In other words, for the other thousands of human beings and hundreds of couples who are yet to get together in the coming centuries, as fruit of our heredity.

And then I ask, what legacy are we leaving for our descendants? If we imagine the planet in which our great-great-grandfather lived, and compare to the one we're going to leave for our great-grandson, how would we feel about it?  How are we positioning ourselves in term of the exacerbated materialism, the deterioration of moral values, the absence of kindness in day-to-day gestures, the lack of priority for the family?   

But Beto Guedes leaves the best for last in that song. At the end he asks us to let love be born, flow, grow, and live.

And isn't that the "secret" that was entrusted to us 2000 years ago back in Judea?

Well, my dear friends, apparently, Jesus Christ gave us the map, and yet we managed to get lost. Without charity (in all its multiple forms) and love to our neighbors (all possible neighbors, as stressed in my previous post), it will be quite difficult to deserve those who came before us, and much less those who are yet to come.

Today, I’ll leave to you the invitation to review our practices, living intensely as a way to honor the thousands of ancestors who made our existence possible, but that we also take responsibility for improving the world for our planetary heirs.  And that won't happen by chance. It requires a minimum of purpose and intentionality.

After all, building a better world for those who are yet to come is also a form of loving thy neighbor and of charity. A kind of love and charity that transcend time.